eyal@echo.canberra.edu.au (Eyal Lebedinsky) (11/10/90)
Hello, I am now installing minix532. I have the distribution files, minix says 'minix 1.3 ...Jun 06...'. I understand that I have to: Download the image (minix) to a boot area on the disk. Download the root (minix532) to a disk partition. Zap root_dev to show the root partition as the minor devide no. make an entry in the device table for my disk. make entries in the partition table for my disk-partitions. I used partition 3 as the root, (0=whole disk, 1=boot area, 2=future large partition, 3=minimal 360k partition). I used device 0 as my disk (a 9380S) and flagged it 7 (d8490+extended...). Now, minix identifies itself, then says 'Pages of user memory: ...' and 'Start user pages:...' and stops. The numbers in the messages are different every time. (BTW, minix was 51393 bytes, inc. header). I will now go to bed and start again on a clear mind tomorrow. Another Q: the 9380S seems to have a size of 319Meg. The booklet says 327Meg. Multiplying cyls*heads*tracks gives 321Megs. What is the expected size for this disk? Do bad sectors reduce the size of do the spare sectors make up for it (or do I loose tracks with more that one bad sector?). I found the disk size by binary searching for the last block no, which did not turn out to be an exact multiple of the sector size. -- Regards Eyal